


we'll keep tattoos for homes

by vharmons



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, Eating Disorders, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Multi, Non-Binary Noah, Other, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-11 16:36:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4443686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vharmons/pseuds/vharmons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gansey shuddered. “It’s the sensation, Jane. We did not evolve to enjoy being struck with needles at a rate of two thousand times per second.” Blue considered asking Mr. Republican Legacy if the Good Old Party had changed their stance on evolution lately, but Adam cut in first.</p><p>“Minute,” he corrected. “Two thousand times per minute.” He held up a fist to Blue, who bumped it without hesitation.</p><p>[Or, the one where Blue, Adam, and Gansey own a tattoo shop across the street from Ronan and Noah's floral shop and everyone's feelings get a little out of hand.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay! I have been working on this for a while, and this is going to end up being a very, very lengthy OT5 fic. Noah and Ronan will pop up in the first chapter. I was going to wait and post this when I was done with everything, but I figure this will be the kick in the pants I need to write on a more consistent basis. 
> 
> Everyone is 24-25 years old in this fic, Aglionby didn't exist, there's no magic, etc etc.

Blue Sargent did not consider herself an artist. 

Unlike her mother, or most of the women she’d grown up around, Blue had always been more comfortable with a pair of scissors and a pack of construction paper than she was with watercolors or acrylic paints. She was not like Gansey, with his sprawling surrealist canvases, or Adam, with his rough, earnest charcoal drawings that littered the floor of their apartment. 

Blue Sargent was not that kind of artist. That was why she handled the business aspects of Cabeswater Ink and left the tattoos to them. (She handled the piercings because getting paid to stab people was a lifelong dream that she couldn’t let go unrealized.)

It was also why she was so stunned by the fact that Adam Parrish was giving her permission to permanently doodle on his stupid, freckled back. “You know,” she said, staring down at the outline Gansey had drawn for her, “when I said that you needed to trust me more, that wasn’t supposed to be taken as an episode description for _Jackass: Virginia._ ”

Adam looked over his shoulder at her, looking far less confident than he had twenty minutes ago. His lips were twisted into an impatient frown, and the muscles in his shoulders were tight, but there was a fondness around his eyes when he looked at her that didn’t leave. “If you don’t think you can do it, don’t,” he said, and the challenge was real, even if his tone was light.

She squinted at him and, without looking away, pressed down on the pedal at her foot, causing the tattoo gun to whir. The flinch was minuscule, but it was there. She sat the gun down on the table and leaned forward. “If you really trusted me,” she said, “you’d let me pierce your ear.” She flicked his ear lightly, ignoring his exaggerated look of annoyance. “You’d look good with gauges. They have cool ones that double as hearing aids, too.” 

He gave her a flat look. Blue smirked, triumphant. It hadn’t been a competition, but he’d still backed down first. “Maybe you can talk Gansey into that one.”

“Talk me into what?” Blue and Adam both looked up at Gansey, who leaned in the doorway between the front lobby and the more private tattoo room. He looked as effortlessly handsome as always, even if his thick-framed glasses were crooked and his hair was mussed. Perhaps _because_ his glasses were crooked and his hair was mussed.

“Letting me pierce your ears,” Blue said, smiling sweetly. Gansey and Adam shared a look that said _dear God, no._ “You know, for someone who does tattoos for a living, you really have a thing about needles,” she said, amusement clear in her tone.

Gansey shuddered. “It’s the sensation, Jane. We did not evolve to enjoy being struck with needles at a rate of two thousand times per second.” Blue considered asking Mr. Republican Legacy if the Good Old Party had changed their stance on evolution lately, but Adam cut in first.

“Minute,” he corrected. “Two thousand times per minute.” He held up a fist to Blue, who bumped it without hesitation.

Gansey pointed at him, eyebrows raised, and looked back to Blue. “Isn’t he supposed to be undergoing that particular torture right now?”

Blue threw her hands up. “You both see the doodles that I leave on the fridge-board, right? You’ve seen them?” 

Adam raised an eyebrow at her. Technically, he raised both eyebrows—he never could seem to get just one, no matter how many times Blue had put a finger to one to hold it down while he struggled to raise the other—but the intention was there. Blue huffed a sigh and leaned down, pressing a quick kiss to his shoulder blade. 

“I appreciate the thought,” she mumbled into his shoulder before nipping at it. She sat back. “But come on. Let’s forget this and go do something more fun with your back.” 

He laughed, and Blue couldn’t help but grin. Adam’s laugh was a rare and beautiful thing, the sound always startled and joyful when Blue or Gansey could pull it out of him. He rolled over and sat up, pulling Blue in for a kiss and leaving his hand against her face. “I reckon that was the least sexy thing I’ve ever heard, Blue.”

Blue struggled to turn her grin into a pout, but a glance at Gansey’s fond expression made it impossible. “It wasn’t _that_ bad,” she said, leaning into the touch as Adam traced her mouth with his thumb. He made a soft noise of disagreement. 

“Gansey,” Blue said, a breath away from him, “probably thought that was sexy.”

“Gansey,” Adam said, tapping her bottom lip with his thumb, “can’t handle it when your ankles are exposed.” Blue wrapped her arms around his neck, grinning impishly. 

Both of them turned, foreheads resting against each other’s, to look at Gansey, who was going pink around the ears. “Do you think he has a fetish?” Blue asked in a dramatic stage whisper.

The bell above the door of the shop went off, and Gansey raised a finger to point at them. “I’m going to go get that. And you two are going to stop tormenting me.” 

“Unlikely,” said Adam, nipping at Blue’s neck as Gansey took a few steps backward into the lobby before sighing dramatically and turning away from them.

Blue erupted into laughter as soon as he was gone, and Adam tugged her in again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve always wanted tattoos,” Noah said wistfully. He tilted his head so that he could read the words on the hat in her hands. He let out a bright laugh. “You work at that tattoo shop, right? I can’t believe Ronan’s offending our neighbors already.”
> 
> “Neighbors?” Blue asked. The shops around them included a book shop owned by an ancient British man that Gansey was inexplicably fond of, a coffee shop, and a pizza place that seemed to leak grease from every opening. She hadn’t seen Noah or his friend at any of them.

“I can’t believe you’re holding me to this,” Blue said, watching Adam and Gansey load laundry baskets into the back seat of the tricolored car they shared. “I mean, I’m the maid of honor; it’s not like I could have skipped my mom’s bachlorette party.”

“Rules are rules, Jane,” Gansey said, practically bouncing on his heels. “You got the fewest commissions for the week and thus," he gestured to the laundry baskets, "you are on laundry duty.”

“Adam,” Blue said, not bothering to hide the whine in her voice.

“Nope,” Adam said. “Tie-breaker vote is going with the rules, too.” 

She stuck her tongue out at him as he shut the teal door of the car. “Better luck next week,” Gansey said grandly. 

“You know, the only reason _you_ won this week is because you compromised your morals and tattooed a bunch of infinity symbols onto sorority brats,” Blue said, pointing at Gansey. “I hope not having to do laundry is worth the level of yawn-inducing horror you’ve unleashed on the world." 

Gansey ran a thumb over his bottom lip, briefly serious as he considered this fact, and then brightened again. “Absolutely worth it, actually.”

Blue huffed a sigh, holding out her hand to Adam and wiggling her fingers until he placed the keys on her palm. “This competition is a stupid idea,” she said. 

“Even if business has been better since we started it?” Adam asked. 

“Coincidence,” said Gansey, because it wasn’t. 

Blue’s phone buzzed, and she glanced down at it, expecting a text from her mother. Her mood brightened considerably. “You know, I think my day’s looking up,” she said. She waved the phone at Gansey as she walked around to the driver’s side door. “Speaking of Gansey compromising his morals, Henry Cheng’s stopping by in an hour.” 

Gansey blanched, and Blue ducked into the car, shutting the door on the sound of Adam’s laugh.

* * *

Doing laundry for three people at a laundromat was a task that Blue was pretty sure no human should have to undertake without the threat of death over their head.

She’d come from a large family, in a house packed full with cousins who were cousins and cousins who were friends, aunts and not-quite-aunts, her mother and her mother figures. It wasn’t like doing laundry for a small army was out of Blue’s area of expertise.

But it was different at Fox Way, when Blue could throw a load of laundry in the wash and then wander off around the house until it was ready to be moved to the dryer or the clothesline. No, the laundromat that she would be stuck at for the next half a day was not the kind of place where people left their belongings unattended. 

It was also not a place with many forms of entertainment, which was why Blue found herself sitting cross-legged atop the folding table with her headphones on and a chunky, half-knitted beanie in her hands. The hats were a new business venture—each of them made with bright colors, hearts, and a chirpy little phrase (the current one being _fuck you_ ). She sold them at the front of the shop, and it was a fun way to bring in some more cash and put her restless hands to use.

She was deep into the second hour of her laundry fest when an armful of warm, dry clothes was dumped into her lap. 

“Hey!” she cried, knocking her headphones down around her neck. Blue’s glare was poisonous, but the newcomer seemed to be immune. “Watch it, _asshole_.”

“You’re the one sitting on the table,” the boy—who was alarmingly tall and had a poisonous sneer of his own—said, squinting at her. “So _you_ watch it.” He turned and stormed out of the laundromat, leaving the laundry and a second boy behind. _What a fucker,_ Blue thought, disbelieving. 

“Sorry. Ronan’s terrible with girls,” the other boy said. This one was around Adam’s height, with bleached hair and a snapback. He fiddled with the straps of his backpack and rocked back on his heels. “Well. People. He’s terrible with people. I’m Noah. I like your tattoos.”

“Me too,” Blue said. She looked Noah over, and he allowed her to, coming off as amiable as his friend had been angry. He reached a hand out to the clothes that had landed in her lap, and she picked them up and handed them to him. “I’m Blue,” she said. “Not like the hair. Just Blue.” 

“Obviously,” Noah said, making quick work of folding the various tank tops, basketball shorts, black jeans, and superhero boxers on the table. “If it was like the hair, your name would be _Navy_ or _Denim._ How could people ever get confused?”

Blue’s laugh at this was genuine, to her own surprise. Despite dating two boys, she never seemed to be good at talking to them. Most of the time, as in her interactions with Noah’s friend, this was not something that caused her much strife. 

“I’ve always wanted tattoos,” Noah said wistfully. He tilted his head so that he could read the words on the hat in her hands. He let out a bright laugh. “You work at that tattoo shop, right? I can’t believe Ronan’s offending our neighbors already.” 

“Neighbors?” Blue asked. The shops around them included a book shop owned by an ancient British man that Gansey was inexplicably fond of, a coffee shop, and a pizza place that seemed to leak grease from every opening. She hadn’t seen Noah or his friend at any of them. 

“We haven’t opened yet,” Noah said, waving a hand. “It’s a floral shop. _The Looking Glass_. You’re right across from us; I recognized the hats.”

“Oh,” Blue said, finally remembering the moving vans and construction happening in the old convenience store across the street. She wouldn’t have expected these two boys to own a shop with an Alice in Wonderland theme, though. _The Looking Glass_. She’d assumed it was going to be a bar, not a flower shop. “So you remember the hats, but not the tattoos, huh?” It gave her a surge of pride. 

Noah laughed. “I’ve been thinking about buying Ronan one for Christmas. Not sure which one to go with, though. I think his face says _fuck you_ more than a hat could.”

“I’ve got a few that would be perfect for him,” Blue said, thinking of the _shitbag_ and _shithead_ ones. “You should stop by some day.”

“I totally will.” He beamed, adjusting his hat. His laundry was folded and loaded into his backpack. “And you should give me a call sometime,” he said. At the look on Blue’s face, he hurriedly added, “No romo. I don’t know anyone but Ronan here, you know.” 

Blue rolled her eyes and opened up her contacts list, allowing Noah to punch in his number. When she took her phone back, she saw that he’d put himself in her phone as “Noah Czerny” with a ghost emoji afterward. She found this bizarrely charming and hated herself for it, a little.

A banging on the glass door alerted them both to Ronan’s return. They turned to look as Ronan held up a bag of fast food and pointed at it with his middle finger, looking straight past Blue to Noah. “I’m being summoned,” Noah said, giving her an apologetic smile. “Text me!”

“If I think to,” Blue said, giving him a small salute. He traipsed out the door, and Blue caught the sound of him calling Ronan an asshole before the door swung shut. She watched Ronan hand Noah the bag of food and drinks, and then, once Noah’s hands were full, steal his snapback. Noah protested, but was clearly as amused as Ronan was. Ronan ruffled his hair, ending with a light push in the direction of the shops.

Blue shook her head, amused, and the buzzer on her machine went off.

* * *

That night, Blue woke up to the sound of Adam’s fear. 

He was rigid, his muscles fighting a war that had been over for years, and Blue didn’t need light to see that his knuckles were white around the blankets.  

Blue slipped out of bed, careful not to touch him.  

Adam’s nightmares were living, breathing things; memories of the man who had raised him and nearly crushed the light out of him. Blue itched to shake his shoulder, to pull him out of the darkness he was trapped in, but she knew that if she got caught in the crossfire of Adam’s memories, it would hurt them both far more than a recurring nightmare. 

So she grabbed a t-shirt off of the floor, tugged it over her head, and padded out of the room to join Gansey in the apartment’s main room, leaving the door to the bedroom open. Gansey sat on the floor with his back against the couch, a sketchbook open in his lap and a mechanical pencil loose in his fingers. His ever-present earbuds were in place, the music just loud enough for Blue to pick up on the soothing tone of it. She gave his shoulder a squeeze as she reached him, and he smiled softly, moving the sketchbook to the side so that she could take its place.

If Adam slept fitfully, Gansey didn’t sleep at all.

Blue curled against his chest as Gansey took his headphones out. “I hate leaving him there,” she said. 

“I know,” Gansey replied, voice soft. He wrapped his arms around her, one thumb rubbing light circles into her shoulder. It was more of a reflex than a planned gesture, and it was soothing in a way a young Blue hadn’t realized touch could be. “There’s nothing to be done about it, though.” 

Blue knew he was right, but the sigh in his tone was the only thing that kept her from being frustrated with him. The two of them watched Adam through the open door in silence, Gansey’s hands stilling around her.

Gansey dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “We’ll be here when he wakes up,” he murmured into her hair.  

It was the best they could do, but it wasn’t enough.

“What were you working on?” Blue asked. She reached for the sketchpad, and made a noise of approval when she saw the subject. A small girl with a fearless smirk and bright blue eyes, her black hair a tangle of curls that ended just before her chin. She held a cereal box shield and a sword made of twigs.  

“Your favorite subject, of course,” Gansey replied. 

Reilly Lynch was a frequent character in Gansey’s stories about his childhood—his first best friend, the first girl to challenge his views of women—and Blue adored her. She was like every children’s literature heroine that Blue had wanted to be growing up. Fearless and kind, rambunctious and protective, hilarious and bursting at the seams with a love for life and the people around her.

Gansey never used to talk about her, but the more Blue had questioned him about his life, the more he’d opened up. It was clear that the two years he’d spent in Henrietta as a child were some of the only years he looked back on affectionately—back before his under-the-table anxiety medication and the stress of perfection came close to ruining him. Reilly’s name had popped up more than a few times, and every new story had become a new, genuine smile that Blue could pull out of Gansey.

She knew all of the stories, now, and had heard them so many times that they felt like her weathered copy of _Harriet the Spy_ —soft around the edges, fuzzy from the frequency with which they’d been handled. 

“Distract me,” Blue said. “Tell me a story.”

“Which one would you like?” Gansey asked. 

Blue considered this, taking his hand and brushing her lips against his knuckles as she did so. “Tell me about the fishing trip. With the cliff-diving. And Matthew.” 

Gansey settled into the rhythms of the familiar story, and Blue leaned her head against his chest, feeling the words as much as she could hear them. She wondered, like she always did, what Reilly Lynch had become after Gansey had been taken out of her life. She was Schrodinger’s Girl, both real and imaginary, far removed from the life that either of them were living now. Gansey had never been able to track her down, though Blue suspected he hadn’t looked very hard.

Gansey’s voice faltered, and he broke off with a soft, “Hey, tiger.” Blue straightened, immediately turning to look back toward the bedroom, where Adam was sitting up in bed, knees drawn up to his chest. Blue made a fist with one hand and tapped it twice with her middle finger, giving Adam a questioning look that he returned with a stilted nod. 

Gansey and Blue made their way to the bedroom, and Blue climbed back onto the bed, pulling Adam to her. Everything she wanted to say— _you’re awake, I love you, you’re safe, you’re so brave, he can’t reach you here, I love you, I love you, I love you_ —came out through her hands stroking his hair or rubbing circles over the most tense areas of his back. 

Gansey lingered in the doorway until Adam fell asleep with his head in Blue’s lap. Blue knew that no matter how much Adam trusted Gansey, no matter how much he loved him, the fear of showing him vulnerability was something that Adam would hold onto for ages. It was best for Gansey to let him know that he was there if Adam needed him and to stay back unless asked. Blue could see that it hurt Gansey, but Gansey had enough tact, enough compassion, not to bring it up.

He slipped into bed on Blue’s other side, and with both of them beside her, Blue felt normal for the first time all night. “You know,” Gansey mused, his voice tired. “Those things you love about my Reilly stories—her kindness, her protectiveness, her fearlessness—those are the things I love about you.”

Blue couldn't help but smile at that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The motion that Blue makes to Adam--the fist being tapped--is ASL for "touch".


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan spared a last glance toward the photo frame on the counter, trying to shake the anxiety that had flooded through his veins when Adam had looked at him. 
> 
> It was just a picture. Ronan wasn’t ashamed of the past that frame contained.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been almost three months and I'm so sorry about that! The offline world caught up to me, and I've been working on stuff for trcshipswap, so this has unfortunately had to take a backseat for a while. The good news is that I'm going to be working on this fic for NaNoWriMo, so I should hopefully be able to get back to bi-weekly updates starting in December! Thank you guys so much for your patience and your lovely comments.
> 
> This chapter touches on eating disorders, suicide, and alcoholism, so if those things are touchy subjects for you, just know that they'll be present. I'm trying to handle these things (+ trans and non-binary things) tastefully, but if I get things wrong, please don't hesitate to let me know how to fix them.

_Lynch. Leave it._

“Ronan, this is Nora Czerny. I’m just checking in on Noah. He seemed a little off the last time he came home. Please make sure he’s eating. Thank you.” A pause. “Make sure you’re taking care of yourself, too.”

 _Beep_.

“Hey, pal! You’ll never believe what happened today. Declan got punched in the face! And it wasn’t even by you! I mean, of course not, you’re not here to punch him. But it happened! He said not to tell you. …I probably shouldn’t have told you. Huh. Call me back when you can!”

 _Beep_.

“Mr. Lynch? This is TJ from Jameson’s. I needed to go over some numbers with you about the shop. Give me a call back as soon as you can.”

 _Beep_.

“Pick up your damn phone. We need to talk.”

 _Beep_.

“Hey, Ronan. It’s me. Val. Your sponsor. You know, the girl you’re supposed to be checking in with all the time like we’re friends who care about each other? You’re getting really close, okay? Don’t lose yourself. See you tonight.”

 _Beep_.

_There are no new messages. Playback?_

* * *

 

“Hey. Do you think a dragon could beat Ant-man in a fight?”

Ronan pulled a half-gallon of milk out of the fridge before turning to glare at his roommate, who hovered just at the edge of his reach. “I could beat Ant-man in a fight,” Ronan said, before taking a long pull of the jug. The expiration date was for three days ago, but Ronan was nothing if not a risk taker. “ _You_ could probably beat Ant-man in a fight.”

The milk could probably beat Ant-man in a fight, too. Ronan set it back in the fridge, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist as Noah gave him a pained look. He waved his phone impatiently. “I’m arguing with Blue. I need more evidence than _anyone could beat Ant-man in a fight because Ant-man is a shitty superhero_.”

“You’re voluntarily talking to a girl who likes fucking Ant-man?” Ronan was only partially involved in the conversation. He was busy cataloguing the empty space around the spoiled milk in the fridge. Nora Czerny’s message played at the back of his head, and he hated her for it. He knew there was no way that Noah had already eaten.

“She hates Ant-man,” Noah said breezily. “We’re playing _don’t get me started_. I think she just likes to argue.”

“No shit.” Ronan avoided speaking to the pint-sized, tattooed horror as often as he could, but Blue, whenever she made her way over to the apartment above the shop, had a habit of being hard to ignore. Ronan got the feeling that she started fights with him on purpose. He slammed the refrigerator door with a flourish, causing the alphabet magnets—today spelling _he_ while the spare _t_ and _y_ hid off to the side—to shudder and slip. “We’re going to get breakfast.”

Noah was silent for a long moment, aside from the unending synthetic keyboard noises erupting from his phone. “I’m not hungry,” he said. It was a scripted response, and it sounded resigned. They both knew how this would go: Noah would get dragged along for food. Ronan would watch him until he’d eaten an acceptable amount of said food. They’d repeat the process in a few weeks, or a few days, or a few hours. Somewhere on the other end of this, Noah would pull Ronan out of nightmares that left him paralyzed by the scream of metal and the smell of charred flesh. It would work, either until it didn’t or until they didn’t need it to.

“Well, get hungry. We’re getting donuts.” Noah gave him a long-suffering look, but Ronan knew him too well to fall for it. He’d seen the way that Noah charmed nurses into thinking the plate of untouched food left in their room was Ronan’s. Noah was nothing if not forgettable, and he knew how to use it to his advantage. Ronan didn’t let himself forget.

“I don’t want donuts,” Noah said, but he allowed Ronan to crowd him toward the door of the apartment, walking backwards with his eyes still on his phone.

“Then get a bagel. Or a McMuffin. Or a goddamn ice cream sundae.”

Noah’s back hit the front door, leaving him caged between Ronan’s arms. He finally looked up from his texting, squinting up at Ronan as he slipped the phone into his pocket. He leaned back on the door, head tilting back, and quirked an eyebrow. Ronan gave him a look that said, well?

Noah took a step forward and pressed his chapped lips against Ronan’s, chaste and familiar. “You care a lot for someone who tries so hard not to,” he said, and then he ducked under Ronan’s arm and headed back into the apartment. Ronan was left with the smell of deodorant, soap, and frustration. He looked over his shoulder at Noah, who was coaxing Chainsaw out of her hiding place with a cat toy.

“I forgot to feed her!” Noah said. Ronan refused to dwell on the irony.

* * *

 

There was a guy waiting downstairs.

Not just any guy—the guy who Ronan always saw through the windows of the tattoo shop at night, turning away drunk customers or ushering sober ones into the back room. Ronan had never seen him closer than from across the street, but he was unmistakable, monochrome and elegant. Ronan could see freckles across his sharp cheekbones, from this close, nearly blending in to his summer-tanned skin. Tattoos—geometric, black and white designs—peaked out from under the sleeves of his faded red t-shirt. They were like framed photos in comparison to the wallpaper of tattoos on Blue’s arms.

The guy was holding a picture frame in his hands, his eyes narrowed, and it broke the spell. Ronan crossed the shop in a few strides and plucked the frame out of his hands. The guy tensed like he hadn’t noticed someone else was there, his hands falling to his sides when he turned to Ronan. “Anybody ever tell you not to touch people’s shit?” Ronan asked. His heart was stuttering in his throat.

The photo was nothing damning. It was just a photo of a nine-year-old with short-cropped, wild curls and a joyfully defiant expression sitting in his mother’s lap, holding a muddy spade while his mother held a potted sprout. It was Ronan, back before he’d told anyone he wanted to be Ronan, and his mother, back before Ronan had held her hand as the light went out of her eyes. The way that the guy had been looking at it, though—it was the way he was looking at Ronan now, a squint that seemed more considering than disdainful. Like he knew something that Ronan didn’t know about himself, and didn’t want to know. He set the photo down on the counter so that it faced the cash register, away from the rest of the shop and the guy’s prying eyes.

“You must be Ronan,” the guy said, finally, and his voice brought Ronan straight back to the hills of the Virginia countryside, all honey and long summer days.

Ronan was starting to tell the guy _you must be in the wrong place_ when a squeal of laughter cut him off. Noah had found Blue and picked her up, spinning her around. The delight on both of their faces was palpable. The two of them stood, leaning on each other, with Blue clutching Noah’s side for support against dizziness. Ronan was suddenly positive that Noah had only remembered to feed Chainsaw in order to give Blue a few minutes to show up and join them for breakfast. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. “You’re Adam, right?” Noah asked, breathless and giddy.

The guy nodded, extending a fist, and Noah bumped it, grinning. “You’re not going to spin me around, are you?” Adam asked. His eyes flicked to Noah’s arm around Blue’s shoulders and then back to Noah’s face. His expression didn’t shift, and Ronan wondered if Adam saw what he did—that Noah didn’t give off the air of someone out to steal people’s girlfriends, even to people who didn’t know he wasn’t interested in sex.

“I don’t think I could,” Noah said gravely. He ruffled Blue’s hair, his smile coming back easily. “Are you coming to breakfast?” Ronan pulled a face, not bothering to hide his objection to the idea.

“I’ve got to get back, actually,” Adam said. He glanced at Ronan, unaffected by the tension rolling off of him, and then looked away. He turned his attention to Blue, and his face softened slightly around the edges. “You emptied the jar, right?”

“We will be dining grandly on sick boy’s douchey mistakes,” Blue said, voice taking on a posh sort of accent. Adam laughed and leaned down to kiss her on the temple. It was an intimate, familiar gesture, and Ronan turned away. Of course, this elegant boy belonged to her. Noah attempted to meet Ronan’s eyes, and Ronan ignored him. “Don’t do any minion tattoos while I’m gone.” There was a hum of laughter in Blue’s voice, the kind people got when speaking in inside jokes and riddles.

“I’ll try my best,” Adam said. Ronan looked back in time to see him squeeze Blue’s hand before heading out the door, Blue and Noah following him in a tangle of limbs and chatter.

Ronan spared a last glance toward the photo frame on the counter, trying to shake the anxiety that had flooded through his veins when Adam had looked at him.

It was just a picture. Ronan wasn’t ashamed of the past that frame contained.

* * *

 

Ronan paid as much attention during AA meetings as he had in his high school classes, which was to say he did not pay very much attention at all.

It bothered Val, who stayed by his side from the moment he entered the church, poking him in the side when he started to drift off. He’d attempted to bribe her into just leaving him the fuck alone, once, and the baleful look she’d given him had been enough to stop his complaints for the next three weeks.

Val was a quiet girl with short-cropped hair and an ever-present skullcap hat. She wore her make-up too dark, she stuttered when she spoke, and the second someone took a step near her, she tended to melt into Ronan’s side, regardless of their intent.

She was an orphan, too, and an alcoholic, but that’s where the similarities between them ended. Ronan would rather die than show the fear that lived in his veins.

That was, if he was being honest with himself, probably why he was here.

“Are you feeling up for coffee?” Val said in her soft voice as she tugged her jacket closer. The meeting had let out without Ronan getting up to talk, as they did every week. People told all kinds of horrific, mind-numbing stories at these things, but he doubted that anyone was ready for his, and he’d gotten his fill of pity years ago.

“Can’t,” Ronan said. He leaned against Val’s car, a boring four-door Toyota, while she rummaged through her bag for her keys. His breath was visible in the brisk October air. “Gotta feed Chainsaw.”

Val’s lips tugged upward, a small and involuntary smile. “I knew you would like her,” she said, pulling her keys and an annoyingly large collection of keychains out. “Sometimes having something to care for helps you to care for yourself.”

Ronan bit back a sarcastic _thanks, doc_. He wouldn’t have brought the tiny, helpless black kitten home from the shelter if Val hadn’t dragged him there in the first place, and pretending he wasn’t grateful felt blasphemous. “I’ve already got Noah for that,” he said, immediately regretting it when Val’s smile grew wider.

“I know you do,” she said, knowing.

“It’s not like that,” he said. It wasn’t. They weren’t dating. They were best friends, they were roommates, they were—whatever you called people who looked out for each other and made out sometimes to take the edge off. It wasn’t like Ronan was harboring secret feelings. (It wasn’t like Ronan wouldn’t say yes if Noah asked, but that didn’t matter, because Noah wasn’t going to ask.)

“I’m sure it’s not,” Val said, clearly sure that’s exactly what it was.

Ronan exhaled sharply, crossing his arms. “Fuck off.” He could tell by her giggle that she wasn’t fooled by the sudden gruffness.

She unlocked the car and opened the door, and then gave Ronan’s shoulder a squeeze, her expression both serious and kind. “Two more weeks to your one year,” she said. Ronan shrugged away from both the touch and her concern.

Two weeks was plenty of time for Ronan to fuck up, and he knew it.

* * *

 

_My body is a canvas._

That’s what the drunks stumbling into the tattoo shop always said, voices stilted by how much effort they were putting into not slurring their words, into sounding as philosophical and non-cliched as they thought they were.

Ronan watched them some nights, from where he leaned against the front of The Looking Glass, chewing on the leather bracelets around his wrist. They’d stumble into the shop, full of drunken hope and excitement, and stumble back out fifteen minutes later, scowling and muttering about the sobriety police.

Ronan Lynch’s body was not a canvas.

That would imply that the things that marked him as different had been painted on gently, with deliberate thought toward the end result. He was a carving, if anything. Something abstract, an experiment in fracture lines and stabilized decay.

The scars that framed his pectoral muscles were neat, slim lines put there by a doctor’s scalpel. The one through his eyebrow had been put there by his older brother’s class ring. The assortment of track marks were from the same needles that had given him a strong jaw and the need to shave every morning.

The jagged, raised white marks on his wrist, hidden beneath an assortment of leather bracelets, had come from a busted beer bottle and hands that hadn’t stopped shaking in a year.

There were days where nothing about him felt anything but artificial. Days where he was certain that he had died with his parents and was just a creature of spite, dragging his body around because his brain told him he couldn’t.

Those days came less frequently now than they had four years ago, when nothing about himself or his surroundings had felt real without pain to accompany it. That was progress, everyone told him.

Most days, progress just felt like bullshit.

Across the street, Cabeswater Ink’s lights were still on, but only Blue and the other tattoo artist—not Adam—were downstairs. The guy had thick-rimmed glasses and looked like he’d been asleep for days, a flush across his cheeks and neck. He sat in the spinning chair at the front desk, and Blue sat on the desk in front of him, legs dangling in the air. Ronan watched as she put a hand to the guy’s face, as the guy leaned into her hand and closed his eyes, as Blue tilted his face upward so that she could kiss him.

Ronan gritted his teeth, remembering the similar moment he’d witnessed earlier—between Blue and Adam. He didn’t know these people—he barely even knew Blue—but he couldn’t fucking stand infidelity, couldn’t understand what could make someone cheat on someone they pretended to love. He’d grown up watching Declan cheat on everyone girl he brought home. He hadn’t put up with it then, and he wasn’t going to put up with it now—not when this girl was clearly already important to Noah. Noah didn’t need more people trying to ruin him.

“Did I miss something?”

Ronan turned, finding himself face to face with Adam, whose slender hand was wrapped around the top of a paper bag stamped with the logo of the drugstore on the corner. Adam’s face was red, snapped at by the cold, and his jacket was too thin to be doing him much good. “I don’t know,” Ronan said, tone sharp. “Did you miss your girl cheating on you? Rumor has it that’s been going on for a while.”

It was a cruel thing to do, saying it that bluntly, but Ronan didn’t care. He was always honest; he wasn’t always kind.

Adam looked from Ronan to the shop window, where Blue had laid down on the desk, covering the papers her mistress had been writing on. “Right,” he said, tone unreadable. “Well, I’ll deal with that.”

He said it like he was talking about dealing with the laundry, or with cooking dinner, or something mundane and not seeped in betrayal. Ronan couldn’t be the only person left in the world bothered by this kind of shit—it wasn’t like adultery had been stricken from the ten commandments. “Whatever,” he said, standing up straight.

Adam cocked his head. “You might as well keep watching, since you’re so interested,” he said. Before Ronan could respond, the other boy was walking across the empty street. He pushed open the door to the tattoo shop, and Ronan heard Blue joyfully say his name, her arms lifting from her position on the table, before the door swung shut.

Ronan should go back inside. If Adam wanted to date a cheater, it wasn’t any of Ronan’s business. He wasn’t going to sit here because he’d been told to. But he couldn’t look away.

Adam handed the bag to Blue, tugging her up into a seated position, and then he turned to the other boy. After a few words, Adam took a fistful of the boy’s shirt and pulled him to his feet. Ronan braced himself for a punch to be thrown.

The punch never came.

Adam tugged the other boy toward him, one hand fisted in his shirt while the other cupped the boy’s neck, and kissed him, long and hard. The other boy’s hand slipped up under the back of Adam’s jacket, pulling him in until there was no space between them. When Adam pulled back, the other boy grinned at him, straightening his glasses with the hand that wasn’t still under Adam’s shirt. He ran a hand down Adam’s arm, covering Adam’s hand, still gripping his shirt, with his own.

 _Oh_.

Adam glanced over his shoulder, making brief eye contact with Ronan from across the street, and Ronan ducked back into the Looking Glass, face flushed and stomach twisting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gave Orphan Girl the name Val because she refers to herself as a psychopomp in the books, and Valkyries were a type of psychopomp. She's also Ronan's sponsor because I thought that was the closest non-magic equivalent to her being a spiritual guide, so I hope that makes sense!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noah’s laugh rang through the air, and they pressed their face into Ronan’s neck to muffle the noise. Ronan’s hand came up to ruffle their hair, and it stayed there, his thumb tracing absent circles into their scalp. Noah nuzzled at his neck, pressing a soft kiss to where Ronan’s pulse beat. “You’re such a dick,” they said, meaning _I love you_.
> 
> “Takes one to know one,” Ronan said, meaning _I love you, too_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright! I know this is late, again, but you all expect that from me at this point. In exchange for my lateness, have a chapter that is literally longer than the rest of the fic up to this point combined. Yay! 
> 
> Special shout out to genderhexe at tumblr, who beta'd this chapter for me and helped to keep me on the right path with the trans/non-binary stuff mentioned in this chapter.
> 
> WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: There is discussion of disordered eating, gender dysphoria, and past violence in here. I don't feel like any of it is graphic, but it does exist.

Natalie Czerny was barely in the door of the shop before she was unleashing a whirlwind of chatter. Noah had talked to her on the phone last night, when she’d been making final arrangements to get from her dorm at James Madison to the shop, but it had been nearly three months since he’d seen her in person. Natalie tossed her duffle bag—emblazoned with the Dukes field hockey logo—at Noah and hugged him around the side, leaving them a lurching and graceless two-headed Czerny monster.

“Holy shit,” Natalie said. Her gaze flitted across the shop, catching on every colorful flower and shrub in the place. Noah was suddenly, blissfully grateful that he and Ronan had spent the last two days getting the shop into perfect working order. “I can’t believe you _live_ in this place. It’s like, a jungle down here!”

Noah laughed, adjusting the purple strap of her duffle bag on his shoulder. “We don’t live _here_ ,” he said, nodding vaguely to the shop. “We live up there.” He pointed to the ceiling, or the apartment, or the cosmos, whichever came first. “C’mon, the stairs are in the back.”

Natalie radiated energy like a beacon, bright and lively where Noah was more subdued and still. She clearly wanted to break into a run and check out every inch of the shop and the apartment above it, but she stayed at Noah’s side, squeezing him around the middle before grabbing his hand and leading the way, despite not knowing where to go.

The apartment above the Looking Glass had begun to feel like home—a concept that had long felt foreign to Noah, who struggled to feel at home even in his own skin—but with Natalie there, it was like he saw it with new eyes. There were all of the basic furnishings—tables, chairs, couches, and a television—and a few odds and ends for decoration (mostly purchased by Noah’s mom in the first week he and Ronan had lived there). Pictures were push-pinned into the wall, plants sat in the window-ledges, CDs and stereo equipment scattered across the floor. It was a nice, open space, one with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and it even had its own balcony, if a fire escape could be called that.

It was messy, but it was lived in. It was a wreck, but it was _theirs_.

And in the middle of it all, there was Noah’s real home—Ronan, sprawled out on the couch with one leg hanging off the side and his laptop resting on his chest. When Natalie let out a delighted cry of, “ _Lynch!_ ”, Ronan slammed the laptop shut, the quiet smile on his face vanishing in place of an expression with about eighteen new added layers of grouchiness. Noah knew, because he knew Ronan, that this meant he had been watching that video of the sneezing kitten again, and he knew, because he knew Ronan, that Ronan would not talk to him for a week if Noah ruined his tough guy street cred by letting Natalie know about this.

Ronan had just enough time to set the laptop on the side table before Natalie had crash-landed on him. He gave Noah a look that clearly said _this is not the Czerny I wanted in my lap and this is not the context I wanted it to happen in,_ and Noah gave him a half-hearted shrug. They both knew that Ronan didn’t actually mind the contact—Noah and Ronan had long ago adopted each other’s families as their own, and Natalie was like a younger sister to Ronan, now, too. Ronan gently shoved at her, dumping her off of him as he pulled himself into a seated position. Natalie took this in stride, shimmying down sideways to mimic Ronan’s previous posture. “Decided to listen to some real music yet?” she asked.

Ronan rolled his eyes, giving Noah a flat look. “I’ll be in bed,” he said, pushing Natalie’s legs so that he could get up. He stomped down the hallway, but he didn’t slam the door, which meant he wasn’t actually mad.

Natalie waggled her eyebrows at Noah, and Noah flopped down on the couch next to her. “That sounds like he’s gonna be waiting for you,” she said. Noah made a face at her. “As long as you’re being safe,” Natalie continued, her voice such a spot on imitation of their mother’s that Noah shuddered.

“It’s not like that,” Noah said. He could feel discomfort building. Sometimes, he deeply regretted telling his family that he was bisexual. It had seemed true at the time, but the complexities of it—of him being interested in people romantically, but not sexually—had escaped him then. He needed to tell them that he was ace. He _would_ tell them that he was ace. Just like he would tell them that sometimes he wasn’t a _he._ Coming out three times felt like overkill, though, and so he stayed quiet.

“Of course not,” Natalie said, giggling. She curled into his side, resting her head on his shoulder and looping an arm through his. “Whatever. Jesus, I missed you.”

Noah was quiet for a moment as he played with her hair. It had become a habit, sorting through the tightness in his chest and putting all of the causes for it into a box in the back of his head. The box was battered cardboard, ragged from being taped and untaped over and over and over in his mind. It helped, though. Sometimes.

“I missed you, too,” he said, and he was grateful that his sister knew him well enough not to comment on the delay. “So, uh. How’s it going with that kid in your math class?”

Natalie groaned and pressed her face into his shoulder, and Noah knew he was in for a long night.

* * *

When Noah woke up, the light filtering through the windows was cool and grey. They moved to curl into Ronan’s body heat, a pitiful groan escaping from their lips, but the bed was empty. Cool, grey light at the end of October meant that it was like, six in the morning. That was too early for Noah. Anything in the single digits was too early.

Something touched their nose, and Noah’s bleary eyes focused on the culprit—Chainsaw, who was curled up on the half of the pillow that Noah wasn’t using. They met her eyes, and she reached out a paw to settle onto their nose. Noah scrunched up their face, blowing a stream of air at the kitten, who mewled and retracted her paw. They reached out with a finger and tapped Chainsaw on the nose, finger tip alarmingly large next to her, and smiled at the affronted noise she made. “Where’s your daddy, babe?” Noah asked, voice soft enough not to spook her.

“Daddy? Gross.” Noah glanced over his shoulder sleepily. Ronan leaned in the door way, wearing a pair of boxers. Noah shuffled forward a little, to give Ronan room to get back in bed. It took a moment, but Ronan complied. “Jesus, Noah,” he muttered, pulling his knees up. “Why are your feet so goddamn cold?”

“Poor circulation,” Noah said honestly. They let out a vague noise of protest as Chainsaw climbed across their collarbones to get to Ronan’s open hands. Noah knew that Ronan would hate how sweet the smile on his face was when he pulled her back into his grasp. Noah struggled into a seated position, resting their head on Ronan’s shoulder and enjoying the sensation of Ronan’s skin against theirs.

Ronan set Chainsaw down, and the two of them watched her. Their feet and knees beneath the covers, crossed and huddled as the lack of space required, created mountains and valleys for the bewildered kitten to navigate. Noah loved to watch her—she was like one of the raptors from _Jurassic Park_ , never trying the same route twice. Ronan settled back, some semblance of relaxed for once with his arm draped loosely around Noah’s waist. He flexed his foot as Chainsaw walked up to it, and Chainsaw hissed, batting at her attacker before jumping off of the bed and sprinting out into the hallway.

Noah’s laugh rang through the air, and they pressed their face into Ronan’s neck to muffle the noise. Ronan’s hand came up to ruffle their hair, and it stayed there, his thumb tracing absent circles into their scalp. Noah nuzzled at his neck, pressing a soft kiss to where Ronan’s pulse beat. “You’re such a dick,” they said, meaning _I love you._

“Takes one to know one,” Ronan said, meaning _I love you, too._

There were so many reasons to panic—Noah’s parents would be showing up soon, and Ronan’s never would; the shop opening could turn out to be a disaster; Noah would have to listen to people refer to them as _he_ and _him_ throughout the day; their parents and sisters would infer both too much and too little about what their relationship with Ronan was—but Noah pushed those thoughts away, taping up that busted box in their head, and sank into the feeling of Ronan’s lips against theirs.

* * *

 Noah smelled their mother’s arrival before they heard or saw it.

Nora Czerny always brought food with her. She had always filled their house with savory broths and sweet cakes, things high in fat content and flavor. Noah had struggled with it through most of their teen years—the battle between the desire for the taste and for their body not to change too drastically. They’d known, since their mother set an arrival date, that there would be all kinds of food coming with her. They’d been preparing for that—extra runs while Ronan was at his meetings, skimping on meals when Ronan wasn’t paying attention.

They were so very, very good at not being noticed. It was a game that they’d perfected years ago. Back when there had been Whelk and there had been home, and the two never seemed to touch. It was so easy to tell their mother that they’d eaten lunch with Whelk, and to tell Whelk that they’d eaten at home. Their mother hadn’t had a reason to suspect that they were lying, yet, and Whelk didn’t have a reason to care.

(But Whelk belonged in that tattered box in Noah’s head, and Noah did not have time to deal with the results of letting him loose right now.)

The smell of dough and homemade cherry filling was enough to rouse even Ronan from his petulant slumber. “Donuts?” he wondered, voice still rough from sleep.

“Pączki,” Noah said without opening their eyes. They took a deep breath, savoring the warm, familiar smell. The fried, fruit-filled Polish dish was halfway between a donut and a small piece of heaven. It had been Noah’s favorite when they were little. Noah had made the mistake of looking up the fat and calorie content once, when they were fourteen. They hadn’t eaten pączki for two years afterward, no matter how upset it made their mother.

Ronan shoved at Noah’s ankle. “Get up. Your mom’s in our kitchen.”

Noah grumbled in response, rolling over to press their face into the pillow. They wanted to grab Ronan by the wrist and pull him back down into bed. Family could wait a little while longer. But that wouldn’t do for Ronan, who threw a pair of basketball shorts and a t-shirt at Noah’s head. “In a minute,” they muttered. 

Ronan swore under his breath, a quiet litany of absurdly profane compound words, and stomped out of the room. It was only a few moments before Noah heard a round of polite greetings from their mother and their father in the next room.

Noah took another deep breath, and this one left them dizzy, because they caught both the smell of their childhood and the smell of Ronan—of gasoline and expensive body wash—and the combination punched a hole in their gut. It took only moments to shimmy into the shorts and t-shirt, and then they trudged into the main room, trying to summon up a smile that their parents might find believable.

Nora Czerny was fussing over the oven, but she could’ve easily have walked in straight from a meeting at her law firm. Her pale blonde hair was pinned back and swept off of her neck, and a simple apron covered up a smartly put-together outfit. Noah knew that in comparison, they looked slovenly and out of place, but it was ten in the morning, and it was their apartment, so they locked those thoughts in the box where they belonged.

Their father, Nathan, sat at the table with Ronan. Nathan had always been the more personable and charming of Noah’s parents, and Noah supposed that he had to be—pediatric surgeons didn’t typically get away with being cold or unfriendly with their patients. He clearly hadn’t shaved in days, but where that made Noah look mangy (and made their skin crawl), their father just looked friendlier. He noticed Noah immediately when Noah walked in, and offered them a smile that chipped away at the nervousness twisting in Noah’s stomach.

Noah’s youngest sister, Nomi, waved to Noah enthusiastically from next to Ronan. Noah walked behind her to plant a sloppy, overblown kiss on her forehead that made her shriek and dive into Ronan’s side. Her hands blurred in a flurry of words, and Noah tapped her on the shoulder—their signal for _I can’t see your hands._ She repeated her statement: “Stop being gross, jerk.” Noah snorted, and thought that they might have been better off letting those signs slide.

“Hi, dad,” Noah said. Nathan was quick to ask questions about the business, involving both Noah and Ronan in the conversation. They fell back into the familiar pattern of signing the conversation out for Nomi, and she watched their hands, pleased. There was a thirteen year age gap between Nomi and Noah, but that had never stopped them from being close before. Noah had started learning sign language as soon as they’d been told by the doctors that Nomi was deaf—it had been a fun challenge at the time that had become an important skill as Nomi had gotten older. 

Nora still took a bit longer to sign things than the rest of them—Polish was her native tongue, and ASL required her to translate Polish to English to ASL—but the rest of the family had always filled in the gaps for her. Ronan had picked up ASL the way that he picked up all languages—quickly, and with little need to study. Seeing him sign along with his words when he talked to Noah’s family left something in Noah warm and pleased—Ronan liked to think that he was a badass, that he didn’t have to care, but Noah knew that Ronan cared more deeply than he would ever admit.

Nora set a plate stacked high with pączki on the table, and Noah squinted at them. “They look different,” they said, watching their mother sit down on one of the barstools they’d dragged upstairs to serve as seating.

“I baked them,” Nora said. “Instead of frying. It’s healthier. It still tastes good, but you—it’s less worrying.” This was not a subject that tended to come up at meal times—unless Noah was blatantly refusing to eat, which they had learned to work around as a young teenager—and Noah was surprised by the bluntness.

But it was nice of her, they thought. That she’d done something more than gently bully them into eating. It was something that Ronan would do, not something they’d grown accustomed to from their family. “Thanks, mama,” they said, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. She beamed, exchanging a look with Nathan, and Noah turned their attention back to the food.

* * *

The Looking Glass’s official grand opening was, Noah thought, probably similar to giving birth, somehow. Noah and Ronan had spent months preparing for this, setting up rooms and putting away finances, and now they were about to put a new life into the world and it was going to suck up all of their free time and possibly turn out to be a giant disappointment that they could never acknowledge as such. (Noah had voiced this to Ronan, whose eyebrows had drawn together for a moment before he had put his chunky headphones back over his ears and flipped them off.)

There were only two dozen or so people in the shop for the opening, but it was enough to make Noah’s chest tighten. They knew nearly everyone—their family, Ronan’s younger brother, various shopkeepers from around the block—but between all of the plants and the people, there was very little room to breathe. They took a few minutes to hide in the break room and panic, doing their best to stuff all of the claustrophobia back into the box.

When they came out, Blue was looking in wonder at some of the more brightly colored flowers, and Noah thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to breathe today after all. After giving her a brief warning of their presence, they scooped her up in a hug and twirled her around. “I didn’t think you could come!” they said, delighted.

“And miss out on supporting our neighbors?” Blue grinned up at them. She’d brought both of her boyfriends this time. Noah had already met Adam, and liked him—he was quiet, but not shy; quiet in a way that meant he thought before he spoke and made everything he did _deliberate_. It was frightening, in a way, because Noah had never managed to be that careful, but he was friendly enough, and Blue loved him, which made him okay in Noah’s book.

Blue’s other boyfriend tended to stay back at the shop when Noah and Blue hung out, so Noah had only met him in passing. His name was Gansey—whether that was the first or last name, Noah had no idea, but they tended not to question what people wanted to be known as. Gansey was a different sort of person altogether from Blue or Adam. Noah couldn’t see any tattoos on him, which meant that either he didn’t have any or he had ones that he wanted kept mostly private. He was shorter than Adam or Noah by a few inches, but he was broad shouldered and carried himself like someone had taught him good posture from an early age. (Noah’s mom had also taught them good posture, but Noah’s height had always made it too easy for them to stick out in a crowd without a good, tired slouch.)

“This is wonderful!” he said when Noah had turned their attention away from Blue. “Do the two of you really grow all of these? Is there a greenhouse in the back somewhere?” 

Adam rolled his eyes, but Noah could see the affection that lined his face when he looked at Gansey. Noah couldn’t help but mirror it. “Thanks! And yeah, there’s a little one here, but we mostly grow the stuff out at Ronan’s family’s property?”

“Fantastic!” Most people who said _fantastic_ were being sarcastic. Noah had learned that pretty early on in life, and was usually suspicious of words like _wonderful_ or _fantastic_ or _majestic,_ but when Gansey said it, it didn’t feel like he was making fun of Noah. It felt honest, which was both nerdy and endearing. “I’d love to see it, someday. Ah, not to invite myself, of course.” The tops of Gansey’s cheeks had gone pink, abashed by his sudden overstep, and Noah laughed.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” they said, grinning. “I’d love to see how you guys do tattoos. They’re so cool. And Blue has already shown me the piercing gun she gets to shoot-slash-stab people with.”

Blue made a finger gun motion at them, and Noah put a hand to their chest, mildly saying, “Ow, Blue.”

“Something tells me you’d be terrible at playing Shatner,” Blue said, laughing at their understated reaction. Noah had no idea what that meant, but she was probably right. Blue was always coming up with these silly little games, things that largely played out over text, and Noah was usually unbelievably terrible at all of them. They’d lost at least ten rounds of _don’t get me started_. That game was rigged in Blue’s favor, though; she could argue about anything until she was blue in name _and_ face.

“Oh!” This was Gansey. Noah followed his surprised gaze across the room to Declan Lynch, who stood with his fiancé, Ashley, near some of the larger arrangements. “Is that Declan Lynch?” 

“How do you know Declan?” Declan rarely came to this part of the state unless it was to check in on Ronan—and even then, he would put on the pretense of being on a business trip. Noah was pretty sure that door-to-door lawyers weren’t actually a thing, but nothing Declan did surprised them much anymore. Noah didn’t hate Ronan’s brother—they were pretty sure Ronan didn’t even hate him, not anymore—but Declan had always been a bit stiff with Noah, and he always went tense when Noah and Ronan were touching.

Gansey knowing Declan was, well, weird.

“Oh, good god,” Gansey said, tone delighted. “I thought that whole family had picked up and gone back to Ireland.” Remembering his manners, Gansey answered Noah’s question: “Declan’s younger sister was my best friend as a child. Do you know Reilly?”

Noah was pretty sure they was going to die right here, right now, with a frozen smile plastered across their face for eternity. “Uh. No?” they said, scrabbling for something that wasn’t a lie. Stupid. How stupid could they be, not to remember that Ronan had mentioned a _Gansey_ from his childhood? Those were some of the few memories that didn’t involve his brothers that Noah managed to pull out of him.

Noah was given three matching looks of befuddlement before Gansey was able to make eye contact with Declan and wave him over. Blue grabbed at Noah’s sleeve lightly, pulling them toward her. “Did something happen to her?” she asked, voice pitched too low for Gansey to hear over the sound of his greeting.

Noah was going to have a stroke, probably. Ronan was across the room, talking to his sponsor and Natalie, and Noah was going to pass out and die right here on the floor. “I don’t think I’m the one to have this conversation with,” they said. It wasn’t like Noah was above telling people’s secrets—but there was no way in hell they would out Ronan like this to get out of an awkward moment.

Declan seemed as surprised by Gansey’s presence as Gansey had been with his. It didn’t take Gansey long to get to the point and to ask about Reilly. Declan looked straight past Gansey to Noah, his gaze calculating and unnerving, and then frowned at Gansey. “You don’t know,” he said, putting the pieces together.

Noah watched as Blue and Adam exchanged a look. They saw Adam’s fingertips press into Gansey’s lower back as Gansey said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” Something subtle had shifted in Gansey’s demeanor—an eager pleasantness had melted away into something politely distant, and he had straightened his shoulders a bit more.

“Declan,” Ashley warned. Her polished, pink nails left indentations in the sleeve of Declan’s button-down shirt. Whatever Declan had been planning on saying, he seemed to check himself. Maybe the combined disproval being aimed at him from Noah and Ashley was enough.

“Reilly’s been gone since she was twelve,” Declan said. This was, Noah thought, possibly worse than anything else Declan could have said to Gansey, because something dark and awful fluttered across his face for a moment before the politeness came back in full force.

“Oh,” Gansey said. Blue reached out to touch his arm. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I never would have brought her up if I’d known.” Blue sent a sharp frown in Noah’s direction, and it hurt enough to immediately get filed into a box, because they couldn’t deal with _that_ when they needed to deal with _this_. They looked away, itching to just run away, but there was still another hour of meeting with people and giving speeches to get through. Noah wanted to be sick.

“I’m sorry,” they said numbly. Gansey brushed him off with a bright smile that didn’t meet his eyes. Noah couldn’t help but notice, later, when Gansey slipped out early and Adam followed.

* * *

It annoyed Noah to knock the _t_ and the _y_ off to the side of the fridge later, after he’d hugged his family goodbye and listened to the _I’m so proud of you, son_ s and the _love you, big bro_ s and the hundred different usages of _he_ or _him_ or _his_ that had made him squirm all day. Noah glowered at the magnets, as if this were their fault, as if the dysphoria and misgendering had something to do with the position of the magnets and not Noah’s own mind. But it was done, and everyone was gone, and it was just Noah and Ronan again, like it was at the end of the night.

Noah, and Ronan, and a whole host of new problems to deal with.

“Why is it that my gender only decides to cooperate when I don’t need it to?” Noah asked, slipping under the covers of Ronan’s bed. Ronan didn’t look up from where he was playing with Chainsaw, but he grunted an acknowledgment. Running into Declan always left Ronan a bit sour. Noah contemplated telling him that Declan had just been doing what he thought was best all the those years ago, and that it _had_ helped Ronan in the long run, but he had other things on his mind.

“Ronan?” The word came out more hesitantly than Noah intended, and it finally got Ronan’s attention. He looked up, squinting. “Blue’s boyfriend. Not Adam.” Ronan pulled a face, almost involuntarily, before his features smoothed over. Noah had to wonder what had happened the other night, when Ronan had slammed into the apartment like someone had lobbed a grenade at him out on the street.

“What about him?”

“His name’s Gansey,” Noah said, weighing each word carefully. “And, um. He knew Declan, earlier.”

Ronan stilled, staring at Noah like he was making some kind of joke. Noah wished that was the case. “Dick Gansey,” Ronan said, disbelieving. “From when I was nine. Lives across the street.”

Noah nodded. “He knew your old name. And um. I think he kind of thinks you died? Because I kind of freaked out when I put it together and didn’t react uh, in time. And Declan said that Reilly was gone.” This was embarrassing. But it was an easier conversation to have than it would have been if Noah had outed Ronan, or if Declan had done it without realizing that Gansey didn’t already know. 

“Jesus shit, Noah,” Ronan said. He laid back on the bed, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, and Noah curled up next to him, chin resting on Ronan’s shoulder and knees knocking into Ronan’s. “Jesus shit Mary _fuck_.”

“You don’t have to tell him,” Noah said. “I mean, we can work out a story about why you know Declan? But um. If you want to tell him, I’ll help.” He slipped an arm around Ronan’s waist, squeezing him lightly, and Ronan dropped his hands, one of them wrapping around Noah’s shoulders.

“It’s not. It’s not just the ‘not a girl’ thing,” Ronan said. Noah knew that he hated talking about things like this—hated talking about things in general—and the words came out hard and stilted. “It’s everything. He doesn’t know about—about anything.” Noah squeezed him again.

It was rare that Ronan even dared to bring up his parents, and he’d had to do it over and over again, starting with the speech that they’d had to give to thank everyone for coming. Noah knew that The Looking Glass was something like a love letter to Ronan’s parents—it was a combination of Ronan’s mom’s love of plants and herbs and his father’s love of _Alice in Wonderland_. They couldn’t really open the shop without paying some sort of tribute to them.

“You don’t have to tell him about that, either,” Noah said. He nuzzled at Ronan’s shoulder. “We can make up secret identities. We could be spies.”

Ronan snorted. “What would we be spying on?”

“Blue’s knitting enterprise,” Noah said. “She’s clearly KGB. Knitting…Great…Beanies? I don’t know.”

Ronan gave a sharp laugh, and Noah smiled into his shoulder. “I can’t believe she’s dating both of them,” he said. “She’s dating _Gansey_. Jesus shit.”

“Do _you_ want to be dating Gansey?” Something in Noah’s stomach hurt at the idea of it—of Ronan finding someone else and not being with him anymore, but he knew it wasn’t fair to either of them to feel that way.

“No,” Ronan said. “I don’t even know Gansey anymore. For all I know, he grew up to be some transphobic asshole.”

“I hope not,” Noah said. He didn’t think that was the case, but he couldn’t always tell. Some people had some unpleasant surprises hidden up their sleeves. “I would hate to have to stop talking to all of them.” He’d do it, though, and Ronan had to know it. They were a package deal. If Noah had anything to say about it, they always would be. 

* * *

The apartment above The Looking Glass had started to feel like home. 

Noah was never really sure what that word meant anymore—it didn’t mean the Czerny family house, where he and his younger sisters had grown up, alternately horrifying their parents and making them proud. It didn’t mean St. Agnes, where Noah had lived for the better part of two months, letting psychologists poke his brain into what they thought was a more useful, ready-for-society shape.

Home always felt more like a person than a place to Noah. At one point, it had been the combined smells of rustic cologne and musty books that wound through Noah’s memories of playing chess in his father’s office. It had been the lilt of his mother’s accent as she taught him words in English and in Polish, wanting to pass on her culture to her son. It had been Natalie’s confident grace thrown against Noah’s clumsy laziness, Nomi’s bright laugh and fluttering hands.

Ronan was home, now. Ronan, who would wake up panting from nightmares in the middle of the night and bang around the kitchen until Noah, who slept like the dead, finally woke up, instead of just outright shaking him awake like Noah always told him to. Ronan, who could glare down a semi-truck, but more often than not had a kitten the size of a softball perched somewhere on his person. Ronan, whose lips and hands and heart were softer than the life he’d lived should allow them to be.

Ronan was home. He’d been Noah’s home since Noah’d woken up to find that he’d been given a new roommate at St. Agnes. But The Looking Glass, a _place_ , well, that was starting to feel like home, too.

He could feel it in the way the sun filtered through the blinds in his room late in the morning, and in the way that the walls were thin enough that he never had to worry about where Ronan was. In the way that he would wake up some mornings to find Chainsaw curled into the space between his neck and his shoulder, like she couldn’t find a warmer place to hide. In the magnets on the fridge that let him dictate what the world would call him for the day.

The Looking Glass was home. Ronan was home.

Noah was throwing the term around a lot lately, it seemed.

Noah’s body had never felt like home.

That had started pretty young. Before he hit puberty and his body started deviating away from what he was comfortable with with no consideration for what _he_ wanted, and before everything self-destructive in his mind really kicked off and went into hyper-speed. Everything just always looked so easy on other people—being who their birth certificate told them to be. Noah had never had that, and not in the way that Ronan didn’t—Ronan had his own things to deal with that Noah hadn’t experienced, but Ronan had always been pretty sure of who he was. 

It took Noah a long time to find out that there was even a term for who he was.

 _Non-binary._ Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, or somewhere off the spectrum altogether.

There were days where Noah was a boy, and there were days where Noah was just a person. (There were also days where Noah was nothing at all, days where “alive” didn’t feel like an accurate classification, but those weren’t days that Noah liked to think about much at all.) It was pretty simple, pretty devoid of hidden meanings or whatever, but it still seemed to take forever for people to wrap their heads around it. It took _him_ forever to wrap his head around it.

It was easier to push all of the hard things into a box, to get them out of his consciousness, than it was to think about them as they happened. Noah had never been good at dealing with things on the fly—he had a tendency to shut down and stutter, to let his hands flutter uselessly as he tried to gesture or stall long enough to figure out what was happening. The boxes helped. They bought him time. But boxes were meant to be filled, and sometimes Noah’s mind overflowed if he didn’t sort through it all.

Noah slipped out of the Looking Glass once Ronan had passed out for the night. He flipped his hood up over his hair and jogged down the street. The cold air bit as his face and his lungs, and the only sound was of the dull thud of his sneakers hitting the pavement over and over and over.

He took the box apart piece by piece, starting with the bulk of it—every misused pronoun, every side glance his mother had given him in the presence of food, the memory of her trying to surreptitiously take stock of their fridge and their cabinets, every moment that he’d wanted to climb out of his skin and be nothing for a few minutes. These weren’t easy things to deal with—they’d never be easy—but Noah had lived with them all long enough that sorting through how he felt about them was a routine process, something that wasn’t directly exhausting, like the rest of it.

Those things—they were everywhere and in every conversation Noah had, and so he had to deal with them. There wasn’t a choice, wasn’t another way to survive. The other things—the farther down into his thoughts he went, the more dangerous it became to be there. That was the space he went to the week he got sick and dropped seven pounds. When he looked too long in the mirror and picked out the scar tucked into the side of his eye, saw the slight flatness to one of his cheeks. It was the place he went to when he heard doctors say _body dysmorphic disorder_ to his parents, a startling level up from the bulimia they’d expected.

It was the place where Barrington Whelk lived, forever holding up a skateboard in his clenched fists, forever ready to put an end to Noah’s sad excuse for a life.

* * *

“Noah?” 

It took Noah a few moments to place the voice, and a few moments after that to remember his panicked phone call— _hi I know it’s late but can you please come get me please I can’t breathe._ He looked up hazily, and when he met Blue’s eyes, his shoulders slumped. She was bundled up in a jacket and a scarf, but he could tell she’d rolled out of bed and thrown them on over her pajamas. It had to be almost four in the morning by now. He’d dragged her out of bed and into the cold for nothing. “Hi,” he whispered, ducking his head again.

Blue ducked through the bars of the jungle gym, coming to settle down next to him. He didn’t realize he was shaking until she grabbed one of his hands in hers, steadying it. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in one of these,” she said. Noah followed her gaze up through the bars, where she seemed to lose herself in the sky. “It’s peaceful.”

Noah leaned into her, squeezing her hand like a lifeline, and rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have called. I know you’re mad at me.”

Blue huffed, the air moving her bangs out of her face, and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Noah,” she said. “I’m not mad at you. I’m annoyed that you didn’t give me a bit more warning before Gansey got a bomb dropped on him. But,” she said, when he made a move to apologize again, “me being upset doesn’t mean that I stopped caring about you, alright?”

Noah nodded, mute, and took in a shaky breath. “Yeah. Sorry.” He felt like he needed to explain himself, because normal functional adults didn’t end up crying in jungle gyms at four in the morning, but he wasn’t sure there would ever be words for what he needed to say. “I should’ve called Ronan, though. It’s, um. It’s really late. You didn’t have to come.”

“What, and miss this view?” Blue lifted her head so that she could give him a soft, genuine smile. There would be no more apologizing to her for this. Noah felt a rush of affection for her that took his breath away. He wanted to kiss her on the cheek, but he didn’t know where the lines were with her like he did with Ronan, so he just squeezed her hand again as she searched the skies. “Look at that one,” she said, pointing with her freehand. “It looks like a bird.” She traced the shape into the sky.

They stayed like that, a pretzel of tattooed girl and increasingly less-panicked boy, their heads tilted together and laughter filling the air, until the sun started to rise.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam knelt, caging Gansey’s body with his knees. He had been studiously drawing designs on Gansey’s back for the better part of a half hour. Though Gansey had a book, it was impossible to focus on it with Adam’s hands occasionally brushing against sensitive areas of his lower back.
> 
> Gansey was fairly certain he knew what he was doing, the handsome bastard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back!! Thanks for sticking around, guys. Your comments and messages mean the world to me and I'm sorry that I'm so terrible at responding to them or updating this on anything resembling a normal schedule.
> 
> I had a small crisis about the number of things that were jossed in this fic by the release of TRK, so let's just get this out of the way: I am basically just pretending that TRK doesn't exist for the duration of this fic. I like Val a little too much to figure out how to retcon replace her with Opal, to be honest. So, no six-year-old Satyr, no Adele Czerny, etc, etc. Henry Cheng and the Vancouver Crowd are the notable exceptions to this, but Henry was always going to end up in here somewhere. 
> 
> We're on to Gansey's chapter now, so have some warnings: This chapter will contain emotionally terrible parents, a very, very quick reference to a past overdose, and Gansey being Gansey.
> 
> Thank you so much to tumblr user @nimmieamee for taking the time to beta this chapter and give me such wonderful advice! <3

It had been a very long time since Gansey had slept through the night.

There were pills he could take for this, he knew, but pills had stopped being a good option for him years ago. He’d proven himself incapable of taking his anxiety medication as directed, and Blue and Adam both had more important things to worry about than whether or not Gansey was too fixated on his past to self-medicate.

And so Gansey let himself get gummy-eyed and tired and kept himself alert with copious amounts of coffee and sheer force of will. It was better than the alternative, for everyone, if he did that without drawing attention to it.

Most nights, he stayed in the common room, or the studio—the room that had been his when he’d first moved in above the shop, helping Blue and Adam with the rent while they got the business set up. It had been convenient, and then troublesome as his feelings for the two of them had grown and deepened. It had been such an impossible thing, falling in love with them—the certainty that he was breaking himself two ways, that he would lose them both because he could not shut down the part of him that yearned for what they shared.

The two of them had _history_. History was something that Gansey had a tenuous relationship with—he could rattle off the dates of any battle in Anglo-saxon history, could sort through the thousands and thousands of references to Owen Glendower throughout Welsh history and mythology, could easily parse down a dense historical text to a succinct summary. But his own history was more difficult to summarize.

Reilly Lynch had been one of the only shining spots of his childhood.

He hadn’t thought of her much until he’d met Blue, and the similarity between the two girls wasn’t a factor in how he felt for Blue—Gansey had been nine when he’d last seen Reilly; he’d not even been at the point where he was interested in people romantically. They’d just been friends, a friendship built on adventures throughout the Barns and a shared sense of imagination and wonder. But Blue, asking after Gansey’s history, had been the one to dig up the memories of that friendship. Reilly was one of the few things in Gansey’s past that wasn’t bogged down by tragedy or betrayal, that ended simply because of a move away from Henrietta, and not because of a fall out or a ruination. Reilly was safe.

Reilly _had_ been safe. Now it turned out that she might be dead.

Gansey replayed the conversation with Noah and Declan at The Looking Glass’s opening over and over in his mind, unable to stop. Everything had been fine until Gansey mentioned Reilly’s name. Matthew and Declan had both been at the opening—for reasons Gansey had still not sussed out; they could have been friends of Noah’s, or Ronan’s—and Reilly had not been with them. Possibly they’d had some sort of falling out with Reilly, but the look on Noah’s face had said more than that.

It had said that Reilly Lynch no longer existed.

Gansey wasn’t able to focus for the rest of the night, and even Blue’s hand on his arm felt unreal. He teetered on the brink of a panic attack, the air in his lungs threatening to dissipate at a moment’s notice. He ended up slipping out, unnerved by the sheer number of bodies inside of the shop, and did not come back.

Blue promised to ask Noah about it at a more private time, but Gansey could tell she’d come to the same conclusion. Gansey didn’t ask Adam about it, and Adam stayed silent in the way that told Gansey he was still making sense of the conversation in his head.

It was a potentially horrid end to one of the few good periods of Gansey’s life, before Blue and Adam had fallen into it. Despite his best efforts to push the thoughts away, they continued to spiral, refusing to let him go. The panic attack finally hit him in the shower, and he curled into a ball until the water ran cold. When he walked out of the bathroom, there was an impenetrable smile on his face.

This was a story that he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the end to.

 

* * *

 

 

Breakfast at the apartment above Cabeswater Ink was always an _event._ It was a flurry of activity, of three very different people with three very different sets of sleeping habits and morning rituals converging into one small, five by eight kitchen space at the same time.

Gansey was normally awake by the time Blue wandered out, usually wearing a scowl and a t-shirt ten sizes too large for her. She always seemed to be drawn out of her slumber by the smell of bacon (which she never ate) and coffee (which she never drank). She would sit on the counter, picking her way through a blueberry yogurt and leaving all of the blueberries in the cup, as Gansey neatly flipped scrambled eggs or pancakes or bacon in the skillet. Eventually, something in her brain would click and turn the larger, nicer side of her personality on.

By that point, Adam would normally have joined them, his hair still damp from the shower and the sweet smell of soap following him into the kitchen. He would be weary and difficult to communicate with until after his cup of coffee kicked in. There was almost always a solid half hour where he would sign with Blue instead of attempting to suss out what she and Gansey were saying over the white noise of the fan above the oven, and Gansey would attempt to join in.

He had been trying to learn sign language since he’d met Adam. Gansey’s hands always felt clumsy when he used it, like the language was built not for his broad, square fingers, but for Blue’s dainty ones, or especially for Adam’s, which were large-knuckled, thin, and calloused. It was a personal failure, and not one that Gansey knew how to correct. No amount of practice seemed to counteract the times that he lost Adam in the thread of conversation.

It was another way that Blue and Adam were connected, a way that they were together and that Gansey never would be. It was so isolating a thought that it depressed him, and so horridly selfish that he hated himself for it. It was a vicious cycle, and one that he knew from experience would never end.

“Good morning, Gansey,” Blue said now, from where she was perched on the counter, bracketing Adam between her knees. She had been sitting on the counter for a good ten minutes without acknowledging him verbally, but clearly the meager yogurt meal had worked its magic. She had her arms draped loosely around Adam’s bare shoulders. Gansey’s eyes drifted to the water droplets that slid between Adam’s shoulder blades and down the curve of his spine, and (absolutely not just to prove to himself that he could), he traced the same pattern with his fingertip.

Adam gave him an amused look, and Gansey slid his hand back up Adam’s back, leaving it between Adam’s neck and shoulder as he responded to Blue. “Morning, Jane.” Adam’s muscles were relaxed under their touches, and it warmed Gansey. Adam deserved to feel comfortable, to feel comforted, more than anyone Gansey had ever met.

He pressed his lips to the tattoo behind Adam’s ear—a small, black _x_ barely larger than the eraser of a pencil—and let his hand trail down Adam’s chest. Mildly, Adam said, “You’re going to burn breakfast.”

But his voice was rougher than usual and he leaned back against Gansey, so Gansey took that as an encouragement and moved his hand lower, thumb brushing against the soft hair beneath Adam’s navel. Adam inhaled sharply, and Gansey couldn’t believe the impossibility of it, the way that he was able to make Adam come to life beneath his hands.

Blue squeezed Adam’s shoulders and let go of him, reaching across the stove to turn it off. “I think breakfast can wait.”

And, like that, all three of their morning routines were in agreement.

 

* * *

 

Gansey loved Adam’s tattoos.

It wasn’t entirely narcissism—Gansey had done quite a few of them, but it wasn’t the work of the tattoos themselves that sent his heart racing. It was the way that the simple lines laid against Adam’s skin like they’d always been there, like he’d been brought into the world to bear these marks. They were subtle, quiet tattoos, mathematical in their precision and design, and Gansey had seen Adam agonize over the layouts of them in his sketchbooks and on the backs of receipts or the inside covers of books for weeks before he’d approached Gansey to do them.

Tracing the lines of Adam’s tattoos was like tracing the lines of Adam’s mind—something that remained frustratingly out of reach for Gansey on a usual day. It was seeing what Adam was on the inside pushed forward and painted onto his arms and his back. Some tangible, silent proof that even if Gansey didn’t know how to untangle the knots in Adam’s psyche, he could trace them on his skin.

Blue’s were similar in effect, though not in style—her tattoos were Gansey’s favorites to work on. She had immediately taken to Gansey’s surrealist, bright style, and within six months of meeting her, he’d nearly covered her back in sprawling watercolor forests and birds. The sleeves on her arms were a combination of her favorite things—nature and nurture twined together into a beautifully incoherent sprawl. Adam had done many of those, starting with the Page of Cups on her shoulder. Blue was loud where Adam was silent, bright and eager where Adam was muted and thoughtful.

Gansey wasn’t sure where he fit on this spectrum. Blue and Adam were not-quite-opposites pulled together by circumstance, history, and unwavering loyalty to each other. Gansey was—Gansey was painfully eager to please, constantly aware of how easy it would be for Blue and Adam to come to their senses and choose to be two instead of three.

They loved him. He didn’t doubt that. He couldn’t doubt that.

But his parents and his sister had loved him once, too.

Gansey would never have tattoos that explained who he was on the inside. Even if every touch of a needle didn’t remind him of the sting of a wasp or the prick of an IV, he had nothing inside of him to make tangible. There was too much nothingness, too much loss to build into imagery fitting for public consumption. He didn’t need the world to know that he was made of negative space, the shadow of the person he was meant to be backlit onto the blank canvas of his life.

He would not place the burden of that explanation on Blue or Adam’s shoulders. It was easy enough, true enough, to let them place the blame for his lack of ink on his phobia of wasps, to let them joke fondly about Gansey’s fear of needles.

But it was othering, to be the only one of them with nothing inked onto his skin.

Sometimes he was certain that Adam could see through this fear on him, this isolation that left him breathless. On those days, Adam would ask if he could try out an idea—he wasn’t sure the design he was working on would lay quite right on an arm, he would say, so could he draw it on Gansey? And then he would produce a box of soft-tipped markers and paint Gansey’s skin, marking him thoroughly, if temporarily.

Today was one of those days, and Gansey suspected it was largely because Adam had picked up on Gansey’s muted silence in the week following the news about Reilly. Gansey’s emotions were too close to the surface to successfully hold them down. He’d have to try harder. It was easier to forget that anything was troubling him at all when he was lying on his stomach on the bed with his shirt off. Adam knelt, caging Gansey’s body with his knees. He had been studiously drawing designs on Gansey’s back for the better part of a half hour. Though Gansey had a book, it was impossible to focus on it with Adam’s hands occasionally brushing against sensitive areas of his lower back.

Gansey was fairly certain he knew what he was doing, the handsome bastard.

He refused to shift his hips and give Adam the satisfaction of it, but the position he was in was rapidly becoming uncomfortable. Gansey pressed his face into the sheets, shuddering as Adam pressed the tip of the marker to his waist. “Moving around isn’t helping me,” Adam said, but he let the full weight of him settle onto Gansey, pressing Gansey’s hips further into the bed, and Gansey groaned into the mattress.

“You’re a villain,” Gansey said, his voice more of a whine than he would prefer. “An absolute villain. A beautiful fiend.”

“Merciful, though. Lucky you.” Amusement was threaded through Adam’s voice as thickly as his accent. He leaned down to press his lips and then his teeth to Gansey’s shoulder.

The door to the apartment banged open in the main room, quickly followed by Blue’s voice calling out to them—and, before Gansey could make a quip about the reappearance of Adam’s villainous cohort, a voice that Gansey was almost certain belonged to Noah. Adam leaned back again, and Gansey made a displeased noise. “Can I just be quiet?” he whispered.

“Historically, no,” Adam said, and then he flopped down next to Gansey, on his back, in time for Blue to knock on the door.

“Everybody decent?”

“Absolutely not,” Gansey said, sending Adam a dirty look that Adam responded to with a shrug.

Blue swung the door open. “Hey,” she said, and there was something tense in her voice that set Gansey’s heart racing. He exchanged a look with Adam, who was pulling himself back into a seated position. “Noah has some news about, um.” She went silent, and Gansey looked over his shoulder, eyebrows drawing together.

“It’s about Reilly.” It was Noah who said this. He hovered behind Blue, his presence quiet and fairly unremarkable. His eyes swung between Adam and Gansey. “And I really just need to talk to Blue and Adam—Ronan wanted to tell Gansey himself.” Gansey frowned. All he’d heard about Ronan so far was that Blue found him infuriating and that Ronan had apparently misunderstood the arrangement that Blue, Adam, and Gansey had. (Gansey couldn’t hold this against him; it was an easy mistake to make.) “He’s downstairs,” Noah added, when he realized that none of them were going to move.

Gansey could feel all of the eyes in the room shift to him, and settled his face back down onto the bed. “Okay. Thanks,” Gansey muttered into the sheets.

“He needs to let this dry,” Adam said, no doubt gesturing to the elaborate designs. “So I can come back to it later.” He jostled Gansey in a way that promised more than another hour of sketching, and Gansey sighed. He was grateful for the excuse for a few minutes to gather himself, but wished it wasn’t so obviously necessary.

Gansey could feel it when Adam lifted his hands to sign something to Blue. “Give us a sec, Noah, okay?” Blue said. Noah made an agreeable noise, and the door shut behind him. The bed jostled as Adam moved to make room for Blue between them.

Gansey felt lips press to his shoulder—Blue’s, judging by the feeling he’d come to associate with her chapstick—and he mumbled into the pillow.

“What was that?” she asked, her chin bumping against his shoulder. He sighed and rolled over, strangely comforted by the fact that Adam and Blue were both in his line of sight.

“I’m not sure if this is something I want to know,” he said. The words felt strangely vulnerable, stripped of any theatricality. Adam carded a hand through his hair, and then Blue pressed a kiss to his forehead. Gansey’s chest ached with the memory of his mother touching her thumb to the same spot.

“You want to know,” she said, pulling back enough for him to see the start of a smile on her lips. “Trust me, you do.” 

 

* * *

 

The collar of Gansey’s shirt pressed too hard into his neck, and he was hyper-aware of the marker lines peeking out from under it as he stepped into the main room of Cabeswater Ink. Ronan would have been impossible to miss even if he hadn’t been the only person in the shop. He was only a few inches taller than Adam or Noah, but that made him substantially taller than Gansey.

Ronan didn’t quite look out of place in the shop, but he’d seemed to belong more at the Looking Glass. The Looking Glass was as chaotic as it was lovely. The first and only time Gansey had walked through its doors, it had been like being transported into a man-made jungle—one full of brightly colored, impossible looking flowers and plants. It was like walking into sensory overload, but in a way that calmed him instead of sending him into a panic. Comfort, in the most aggressive form possible.

Cabeswater Ink was the antithesis of that in many ways. It was simply and sparsely decorated, aiming more for a professional, modern showcase look than that of a hole-in-the-wall dive bar-inspired parlor. It was friendly, he thought, but it inspired confidence more than it inspired wonder. It was calming because it was familiar. It was soothing because for Gansey, Cabeswater Ink was Adam, it was Blue, it was everything that the three of them shared. It was home.

Ronan wasn’t familiar. He wasn’t home. That’s what made him stand out here, as much as Gansey and his bright polo must have stood out in Ronan’s shop. But the subject of Ronan’s current preoccupation _was_ familiar. He leaned against the front desk, looking down at Gansey’s open sketchbook. Gansey’s pulse spiked, and he itched to step forward and close the book. Instead, he cleared his throat, his polite upbringing taking over. “Ah. Ronan, I presume?”

Ronan looked up, and the soft, quiet smile on his face was replaced by a guarded look so quickly that Gansey couldn’t process when his expression had changed. Gansey didn’t know how to start this conversation, and the longer Ronan went without responding, the longer Ronan simply _stared_ at him, the more anxious he became. Had Noah been mistaken? Was this some sort of joke?

“Fuck,” Ronan said finally, as if it settled something. He pushed off of the desk. “Okay.” He tugged the seat of the desk out and gestured to it. “Have a seat, Dick.”

Gansey hadn’t given Noah his first name. It bothered him to think that Blue or Adam had discussed his given name with someone Gansey didn’t know. Perhaps it had been Declan Lynch. If he was friends with Ronan, it could have been brought up after Gansey had fled the shop.

Or, possibly, Ronan had just meant _dick._

“It’s Gansey,” he corrected.

Ronan snorted. “That makes two of us, then.”

Gansey didn’t ask what he meant. He sat down in the chair and watched Ronan pace. There was a restless, furious energy to Ronan that was intimidating. It was like staring into the sun, if the sun were a very tall, very handsome man who wouldn’t stand still. Ronan pressed his closed fists to his head, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, and then exhaled sharply. He ripped the sketchbook off of the desk and held it out to Gansey, insistent.

Gansey already knew what he would see when he took his eyes off of Ronan’s face. The sketchbook was still open to a doodle of Reilly he’d been working on earlier as Blue had been finishing off with a client. In the picture, Reilly had a large paper crown falling over her curls, and was holding a young Gansey at the point of her tree-branch sword. Gansey took the sketchbook gingerly. He tried to suss out whether or not he’d closed the sketchbook before Adam had tricked him out of his shirt. Had he left it open to this page, or had Ronan flipped through the rest of the book before Gansey had interrupted? Gansey’s art was the most honesty he could give, and the idea of someone other than Blue or Adam seeing it all—

“That’s me,” Ronan said. “Reilly, that was me.”

Gansey stared, his mouth almost certainly hanging open. Ronan’s hands were clenched into fists, his arms crossed tightly across his chest. Gansey looked between the drawing of a smiling, exuberant child in his hands and the tense, angry young man in front of him. Reilly, his childhood best friend, the safest part of his childhood, who was now a total stranger—not exactly because Reilly was now Ronan, but because Gansey had not seen this person in well over a decade. Gansey had spent so long grasping for history, for connection. But this was history without context, connection worn to nothing by absence and time. What he’d wanted, but sideways. The person he’d thought of for so long, pulled back to reality from the myth they’d become.

“Well, fucking say something.”

Ronan’s voice startled Gansey, and shame flooded him—Ronan had entrusted him with something deeply personal, and Gansey wasn’t responding in the right way. He’d given in to the selfishness of his own emotions, and he couldn’t allow that. He needed to refocus on Ronan, on what Ronan had said, on what response would help him the most.

Gansey had no idea what one was meant to say in a situation like this. It was not something his mother would have thought to cover in her lessons on social etiquette. But it finally sunk in that this meant that Reilly had not died as Gansey had worriedly believed. That Ronan was here, alive, and though they were strangers now, there was no reason for them to stay that way. And that relief made it easier for Gansey to give him a sincere, if belated, grin. “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” he finally said.

“Yeah, well, you were mostly right,” Ronan said. He scuffed at a mark on the floor with his shoe, eyebrows drawn together. Gansey could remember now, when they were children, when Reilly— _Ronan_ , when _Ronan_ would do the same thing. He was overwhelmed with fondness, and was glad to be sitting down—it made it much easier not to succumb to the urge to clasp Ronan’s shoulder or, embarrassingly, pull him into a hug, an impulse that he blamed Blue for. The small comfort of that familiarity settled in Gansey’s chest, making it easier to breathe.

Gansey leaned forward, setting the sketchbook down on the desk in front of him. There were so many questions he had for Ronan, and none of them seemed appropriate. None of them seemed like they would put him more at ease. Gansey knew that they were no longer friends—that too many years had passed, that they had both grown into startlingly different people than they’d been at the age of ten—and it hit him that maybe he wasn’t what Ronan had been expecting to see, either. Gansey himself had certainly not expected to be a tattoo artist in a polyamorous relationship at the age of twenty-three.

“Can I ask you a question?” Gansey said, standing up. He stood several inches shorter than Ronan, which was not entirely surprising, as Reilly had dwarfed Gansey by several inches as a child.

Ronan squinted at him but lifted his chin, which Gansey took as a yes.

“Are you the one who introduced Noah to that awful murder squash song?”

For a moment, Gansey thought he’d misjudged his approach, as Ronan continued to stare at him, arms folded, but then the question seemed in sink in, and Ronan laughed, open and bright in a way that made Gansey’s heart turn over in his chest. His own grin returned full force, and he found himself laughing along. “Because we can’t be friends if you were,” he said, breathless. “That song is a plague.”

“That song is a goddamn miracle,” Ronan said. He huffed a laugh, finally letting his arms drop back to his sides. He was alive, and finally at ease, and Gansey couldn’t think of much that he wouldn’t do to keep him that way.

“Do you want to come upstairs? Catch up, talk some? I mean, there’s so much—it’s been so long.” An entire lifetime, or two. Gansey knew that he sounded overeager, that it should embarrass him, but he couldn’t focus on it.

Ronan mulled this over, chewing on the leather bands around his wrist. “Later,” he finally said, casting a wary glance toward the ceiling. It reminded Gansey that upstairs, Noah was having this same conversation with Blue and Adam—that Gansey would not need to hide this or lie to them for Ronan’s sake—and he was relieved.

“Of course,” Gansey said. “I’ll—we’ll figure something out.” He flipped the sketchbook shut and set it on the desk. He extended a hand to Ronan. Ronan looked at it with mild, put-upon disgust before reaching out to curl Gansey’s hand into a fist, which he then bumped.

“Still a fucking nerd,” he said, as if this was a comforting thought. He took a few steps back toward the exit. “Send Noah back when he’s done.”

 

* * *

 

The evening routine at Cabeswater was an _event_ , but most things in the apartment seemed to be, if Gansey was being honest with himself.

On a typical night, Gansey and Blue would engage in a series of increasingly absurd antics to keep each other from getting to the shower first. Blue was the reigning champion, as she was not afraid to flip chairs into Gansey’s path and run. Gansey would tidy up the studio and bother Adam, who saw night time as the best drawing opportunity, until Blue relinquished her hold on the shower. Sometimes, she left enough warm water for him to get his hair clean.

Throughout the night, they’d all drift toward the bed. Gansey and Adam would usually sleep on the outside, because they got up the most frequently, and Blue would curl between them in the middle. The order would fluctuate depending on if someone had had a bad day or needed to get up early, but that was usually the pattern they would fall into. Gansey would fall asleep with his arm around Blue’s waist, his fingertips brushing against Adam’s hip.

There was some comfort in routine, but it made the breaches in it stand out even more.

Adam peeked his head into the bedroom, where Gansey was lying down, paging through a book. “You know,” Adam said, stepping forward to lean in the doorway. “You could avoid all of this if you just showered together.”

“That would take away from the thrill of the chase,” Gansey said grandly, smiling at him over the top of the book.

“No one’s running from you, Gansey.” Adam’s voice was soft enough, serious enough, to make Gansey avert his eyes. It was such a difficult, conflicting thing, this act of being known. Gansey closed his book after carefully marking the page and set it to the side.

“You never finished our appointment,” he said, his hand coming up to touch the tendril of the felt-tip tattoo that snuck up around the top of his t-shirt.

“Seemed like you had bigger things to worry about.”

Adam picked his way across the knitting needle minefield that was their bedroom floor and climbed onto the bed. The mattress groaned and jostled beneath them with the addition of his weight as he positioned himself above Gansey. Gansey attempted to look put-upon by the disruption, but doubted the success of his expression—it was difficult to appear anything less than rapturous when Adam was close enough for Gansey to see the pale freckles that dotted his eyelids.

“Taller ones, maybe,” Gansey said. He cupped Adam’s face, running a thumb along his cheekbone. “You’re currently the tallest.”

Adam closed his eyes and turned his face so that he could kiss Gansey’s palm. “Only until Blue hits her growth spurt,” he murmured. Gansey laughed, pleased both by the joke and the feeling of Adam’s smile unfolding into his hand.

“Of course,” he said.

He held back the words pressing at the back of his teeth— _I love you, I love you, I love you_ —and let his hand slip down to Adam’s neck instead. Those words were a delicate and precarious thing for both of them—Adam, who could not possibly have heard them enough growing up, and Gansey, who had been conditioned to take love on faith rather than on spoken promises. The effect of the words on both of them was difficult to predict, and Gansey didn’t want to embarrass either of them or take the smile off of Adam’s face.

So he pulled Adam down and kissed him, filtering his thoughts into an action that was easier for them both to understand.

 

* * *

 

Gansey’s last communication with his parents had come in the form of a letter that had been delivered to his dorm room by his father’s lawyer.

It arrived two weeks after he had overdosed on Ativan, and four days after he’d announced to his parents that he planned to take a year off from college so that he could get his anxiety under control.

The letter was less than a page long, but all Gansey remembered, most days, was the final line above his father’s signature.

_You’re welcome to come home when you’ve done something to be proud of, Dick._

The words came to him in strange moments. He remembered them the day that Cabeswater Ink opened, the day that he was made aware of Adam and Blue’s individual feelings for him, the day he managed to fix the Hondayota’s alternator on his own, the day his work was featured in a local newspaper’s arts section, the day he realized he’d gone a year without a panic attack.

Every time he felt the flutter of pride in his chest, those words came back to him. And every time he reminded himself that these things—these small, lovely things that meant so much to him, that shaped everything he was today—would not be classified under his father’s definition of _pride._ No happiness, no fulfillment, no success that Gansey had fought for in the past few years was enough to allow him to go home.

Long after Adam’s breathing had evened out and Blue had fallen hard enough into slumber to sprawl across the bed, hugging Adam around the middle and tangling her legs with Gansey’s, Gansey considered what he had to be _proud_ of.

There was Adam, with his quick tongue and soft hands, whose tattoos seemed as natural on his skin as the freckles that covered him from head to toe. Blue, with her ever-changing hair and her refusal to fit in gracefully with the world around her. The shop, which was finally getting enough business to be lucrative rather than just keeping them afloat. His art being turned into a living, breathing showcase in the form of the hundreds of people he’d inked over the past few years. Ronan Lynch, for existing so fearlessly as someone Gansey couldn’t have predicted he would become.

He could be proud of himself for maintaining this relationship, for finding Ronan and not reacting to him in a typically _Gansey_ way, for being a better person than he had been under his father’s roof, but it seemed selfish. Pride meant more when it came from outside of his own biased gaze.

His father would not be proud of him, he knew. But Adam was, and Blue was, and sometimes— _sometimes—_ Gansey let himself believe that he was worthy of that pride.

That had to be enough.

Gansey had to _let_ that be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up is Adam! Thanks for your patience, everyone.


End file.
